A last viewed view of a document refers to the section of the document (or portion) that was viewable to a user in the application's window when he/she closed the document (or quit the application.) It can be either one particular page, two partial pages or may comprise of more than two pages if the document is being viewed in a zoomed-out mode. This view will depend upon the application window's dimensions (for example, the user may have opened the application in compact mode or full mode or may have resized to some other size).
A last modified/edited view refers to the document section (or portion) that was viewable to user in the application's window when he/she made the last set of changes to the document. As in the case of last viewed view, it can be one particular page, two partial pages or more than two pages. This view will also depend upon the application window dimensions (for example, user may have opened the application in compact mode or full mode or may have resized to any other size).
Existing techniques, in the thumbnail view of a file browser or explorer, display a thumbnail of the first page of the document or merely a preview of the document file entry icon. Further if user hovers mouse cursor over this thumbnail, only a limited amount of information, for example, type, title, modified date and size are viewable. Under existing techniques, it is difficult for a user to discern without expending an enormous amount of time as to which document he/she last reviewed. Further under existing techniques, it is extremely tedious to discern the changes or modifications that he or she made to the document without actually opening the document.
In instances where a document editing application suddenly crashed or abruptly ended due to power failure or some other reason, its difficult for the editor to just view the document file entry icon and determine whether or not their last set of changes were successfully saved.
Lastly, even upon opening the document, information regarding the last modification/change to the document cannot be easily determined because in most instances the document will open at the very beginning of the first page. This by itself is not very useful since the first page of the document may not be the one that the document editor last edited or modified or viewed. In certain other instances, the document editor is required to explicitly setup preferences of the application such that the document reopens to last viewed page for all files. However, even in these cases, an evident and easily discoverable way to instruct document editing application to remember the last modified view is lacking.
Thus, there remains a need for a way to provide a pictorial/thumbnail representation of the last viewed view of a document or a last edited view of a document so that a user may discern the last viewed view or last edited view of a document without actually opening the document.